Creative musings in bright colors

Posts tagged ‘#31DC2017’

Oh my gosh, the 31 Day Challenge was…challenging. I suppose that’s appropriate! I’ve made giant collages of the designs I created. That was actually rather fun 🙂

In terms of how well my various posts did…
Blog Overall:

Redshift Galaxy (galaxy)

Rainbow Splotches (rainbow)

Rose Gold Roses (flowers)

Blog By Views on Date Posted:

Georgia O’Keeffe (art)

Marble-ous (water marble)

Half Moon Sky (half moons)

On Instagram:

Redshift Galaxy (galaxy)

Rainbow Splotches (rainbow)

Shattered Foil (red) tied with Georgia O’Keeffe (art)

Although Bumblebee! (yellow) got the most comments 🙂 I suppose I should respond to those at some point! Oops.

Personally, I agree with some of everyones favorites, and don’t really care for others! Redshift Galaxy (galaxy) came out wonderfully, and I liked Rainbow Splotches (rainbow), Bumblebee! (yellow), and Half Moon Sky (half moons)…but no one but me seemed to enjoy Beachside (blue), Purple Pointed Fade (purple), or Neon Peaking Through (stripes)!

Anyway, this is almost certainly my final year taking part in the 31 Day Challenge, at least to its full extent. This time next year, I will be starting my intern year in internal medicine, and will almost certainly not have time or energy to paint such dramatic designs on my nails! Maybe I’ll do a few, but patient care will, obviously, come first. So I hoped you enjoyed! Which were your favorites? 😀

For the past few years, I’ve tried to do my “honor nails you love” final day of the 31 Day Challenge after one of the manis actually entered into the challenge. This year was troublesome, because there were so many awesome designs! A few were amazing, but far too complicated. So, I settle on this!

The design is inspired by Glitterfingersss glitter day prompt. I did not want to use lose glitter, so I ended up grabbing my new-and-untried crazy silver holo glitter bomb polish, and painting on some flowers! All in all, I don’t know how much this resemble’s gliterfingerss’ original, but I still like it. It is suitably glitter and flowery, even if the base and colors are different!

The base itself is a magnificent (if overpriced) polish called 24 Karat Diamond by F.U.N. Lacquer. I recently bought three of their polishes when LiveLovePolish had a sale. They are honestly too expensive to be worth it for me, but darn do they make pretty polish! 24 Karat Diamond is small silver holographic hexes suspended in a clear base. This took four very thin coats for opacity, and honestly the coats dried surprisingly fast. I don’t love the four-coat problem, but I imagine that next time I will put it over a silver (or silver holo) base and use 2-3 coats. I also wanted to make it as opaque as I could, or I would have stopped at three coats. Despite that, this polish is MESMERIZING. I have not seen intense shifty glittery holo like this…maybe ever. Certainly not in my collection. It is as though someone took Harp On It by Color Club and broke it into individual tiny rainbows, that still somehow look truly silver. I cannot wait to play with this more!

All that said, this polish took a good 30 minutes to remove and there is STILL glitter around my nails (I just took it off). The polish itself is not particularly top coat hungry, and a single coat of Seche Vite was enough to smooth it out. I could not stop staring at my fingernails! I think this might be more of an accent nail type polish in the future, given the removal time, but we shall see!

I am glad that I did not end up stamping on either the roses or the leaves, as I was initially planning. Something about this being fully free-handed makes me happy! And this is it for the 31 Day Challenge. I am so glad that I kept up! I am proud, even if this is my last year. I’ll do a re-cap tomorrow, and then on to new nail art!

Every year on “tutorial” day I am torn: do I make nail art based on someone else’s tutorial or do I make new nail art and my own tutorial? I had more time than usual this year (I got out of the clinic early) so I went with the make-your-own!

One really cool idea that I’ve been seeing around is geode nails…but all the good ones are made with either 400 layers of polish, acrylic paint, or gel polish. I will do none of those. I also have seen a lot of marble nails (the stone, not watermarble) and I wanted to see if I could combine the two! Plus, bonus water decals.

Basically, I wanted to demonstrate how you turn a rather unimpressive water decal into something glittery, and then unique. See below for actual steps…

Coat your nails in a base coat of your choice. Then paint your nails white and top coat (I used Snow me White by Sinful Colors as my white)

Remove the clear layer from the top of your water decal, and cut into nail-sized pieces.

Soak the decal in water for 15-45 seconds (if it has a clear background, closer to 15, if, like mine, it has a solid white background, more like 45). Apply to your nail, position to taste. Blot to dry, and clean around your nail beds to remove the excess decal with acetone.

Snazz it up! Pick the color you think would look best glitter-ized (likely not the most common color, so here I would not have picked white or blue) and add a coarse glitter. I picked the yellow, and covered it with gold glitter (Million Dollar Dream by F.U.N.).

You can stop here, if you want glittery marbled nails…or you can go on and personalize with stamping decals. In this case, I grabbed geometric triangle images (ND-104 and BP-L054).

Chose your two colors: the stamp and the inner colored part (I went with Black on Black by Sinful Colors for the stamp, and #333 by WOW for the inside part). Pick up the stamp, ideally on a clear stamper, and then color it in with your chosen polish.

To apply the decal to your nail, paint a thin coat of quick-dry clear polish, and when it is barely tacky (70% dried), use the stamper to transfer the design. Obviously you’ll be going one nail at a time for this part, unless you have numerous stampers.

I don’t know that I love having gone with a medium grey for my fill color, but I thought white would be too boring and gold would stand out too much. I guess I’m ok with it!

The water decals that I used were a bit of a surprise. I requested to review a 12-pack of full-nail water decals, and picked a collection of marble finishes. This particular design was the ugliest to me, so I used it hoping I could make it prettier. I was, however, not expecting the decals to have their own backing (white rather than clear) and they were thick enough that I probably didn’t need a white base! Also, they were thick and so bunched, which could have been a problem, but they actually stretched in a really fascinating way, which meant they ended forming to my nails (with a little pushing around) perfectly. I really love these decals! If you want the full set of 12 from the Born Pretty Store, you can find them here for $1.99.

Apparently today is my 5-year blogaversary. I keep forgetting that it’s in September! I’ll have to arrange something fun when this challenge is over…This mani is a bit simpler than some of my other recent manis, but a lot of that is because I can never figure out what to do with the “supernatural” prompt for Day 29 of the Challenge!

This time, I settled on something related to an angel. I wanted to do a gorgon, but I am still seeing patients so I can’t really have green scaled nails. Angel it is! I didn’t have time to free-hand lots of tiny feathers and I didn’t own an angel wing stamp, but I did own a feathery stamp!

I ended up starting with a blue-grey base with gold flecks and lots of holo shimmer. I then advanced stamped (aka colored in) the feather image using a ridiculously shimmer-gold polish that is a muted white under indirect light. This polish was one of those that once I got it, I regretted it (although it was free, I got it years ago in a contest)…and now am really glad I held onto it! I’ve used it a number of times for coloring in stamps when I don’t want to go straight for insane gold.

Initially, I was going to do the purple and yellow-sun design from Tangled for this, but I figured that I’ve done that already and I want to try and bring attention to the places hit by hurricane Irma. However, most of those flags either would not go well together or would be far too complicated to paint, so I settled on this.

This was designed around the flags for the Bahamas and Saint Lucia, but then I just went and grabbed other yellow-and-blue flags that I thought would work well together. I’m quite pleased with how this came out!

Most of the nails are vertical (so if the flag were sideways it would start at my cuticle), my thumb is horizontal, and I totally messed up the orientation of my middle finger! I like the aesthetics of it, but technically the triangle should start from the left side of my nail, not the nail base. Artistic license? Anyway, the flags are: pinky – Ukraine, ring – Bahamas, middle – Saint Lucia, pointer – Sweden, and thumb – Barbados.

Usually this is one of my most dreaded prompts (up there with “supernatural” and “fashion”) but this year I’ve liked all of them! I suppose its fitting, since this is likely my last year participating in the 31 Day Challenge.

As the title suggests, today’s theme is paintings by the artist Georgia O’Keeffe! I have to say, her name has a lot more “e” in it than I initially thought.

Usually, for the inspired by art day of the 31 Day Challenge I just pick something that I can pretend was art. Occasionally I actually had found a painting online and used that. However, I think this is the first year that I went in with an artist in mind and tried to (loosely) recreate something well-know!

Since I had my awesome replacement floral stamping plate from the Born Pretty Store, and I had a lot of time on my hands, I decided to go with flowers. The artist that I know best who made flowers was O’Keeffe, so I went looking for paintings of hers that I thought I could make using my stamping plate. Voila!

Each nail is a different painting, some of them more faithful to the source than others. My personal favorite ended up being the blue flowers nail, then the orange poppy (which is actually a rose). You can see where my inspiration came from. I did try and make each nail background match the painting background, generally by sponging on a color over a solid base (darker blue over a pastel blue, white over periwinkle), although you really cannot see much of the base color on most nails.

Hope you enjoyed! This was a lot more fun than I expected to make. As usual, if you want to pick this up from the Born Pretty Store (and it does stamp remarkably well, you can see all the different color polishes I used to make these stamps!), you can find it for $2.59

Raindrops are totally a pattern, right? So droplets must be! I was going to create a nautilus shell, but I didn’t want to spend hours painting each nail…I settled on this and I rather love it.

The design was actually inspired by a previous design of my own, Pond Ripples. Since I obviously still have the same colors, and I recently bought a new copy of the stamping plate I used (that now picks up much MUCH better), I was planning to exactly copy the design…but THEN I tested my teal flakies over a bunch of other polishes and picked a different base!

If nothing else, this mani is insanely glittery. Not in a holographic way, but just…a lot of layers of shimmer. You cannot tell in the photos but when I shift my nails its mesmerizing. I am also glad I bought a new copy of this plate, I really love this stamp!

I actually added matte top coat to one finger just to see if I liked it better (because I have to do that whenever I add flakies) and although it was pretty, I liked the depth of shimmer better with shiny top coat. Shiny it is! Hope you enjoyed 🙂

Day 25’s theme is “fashion” which is a bit of a problem, as I am still wearing the same clothing I wore in high school (and I’m 29). That said, this years was a little easier than most! I’m also a little late in posting since I was traveling all day, oops!

While searching for fashionable gowns on google, I stumbled across an absolutely stunning dress by Marchesa. I want it. The colors and the pattern and the fabric and most especially the cut of the skirt. So, of course, I had to try and recreate it on my nails!

This mani took two days, mostly because I wanted a completely dry base color before I was willing to attempt to make a gradient using metallic polish. Usually, I end up with bubbles and messes galore, and I happen to be attending a wedding this weekend so my nails need to be flawless! So, I painted on the hot pink metallic base (Petites Color Fever – Raspberry Ice), waited a day, and THEN did the gradient (OPI – Cute Little Vixen and Confetti – Masquerade Ball). Success!

Initially, I was not going to put anything over my accent nail (which was going to be a black jelly with a pink-to-black stamp, but I gave up and grabbed one of my favorite glitterbomb polishes instead, The Unloved by Emily de Molly), but it looked too bright next to the completed gradient so I added a stamp that reminded me of the top of the Marchesa dress (BP – L049). I think it came out really well!

I am going to consider the fashion day a success this year, which might actually be a first for me! Also, my nails are super glittery and metallic. But I have to admit, I am not looking forward to trying to remove that glitter polish!

I love painting nails inspired by children’s books…and I’ve been wanting to try The Rainbow Fish for a while! I just haven’t had the time (until now).

The inspiration came from Adventures in Acetone, although I decided to stay true to the book and use only creme polishes for the scales other than the rainbow silver scales. I do wish, in retrospect, that I had used a lighter pink (even though I don’t actually have a good one)!

The story is about the joy that one person can get from sharing. Its quite a nice message! It also was one of my favorite books growing up (not that I wanted to be taught to share with my sisters) but because the shiny fish scales were just so pretty. This mani is a bit darker than I imagine the fish being, but still pretty and suitably colorful! Who wants to play with silver holo? 🙂

These took FOREVER to paint because I had to do one scale at a time, and couldn’t put two wet dots next to each other or they’d run! I still love the end result though 😀 Hope you enjoyed! It looks like I wasn’t the only one to do Rainbow Fish this year!

The nails for Day 23 (movie or TV show) are near and dear to me. I spent hours agonizing over what color and shapes to use on this, and it will make absolutely no sense to anyone who hasn’t seen the show and epilogue movie of Madoka Magica.

So, Madoka Magica is a TV show (on netflix) of the “magical girl” genre (think Sailor Moon) but which was created at a show rather than a comic and as such has a wonderful but concise plot line (somehow without any plot holes!), interesting characters, and an incredibly compelling story. It also has some of the most amazing art I have seen in recent memory. There are a number of animes and other cartoons which I cannot watch because they aren’t pretty enough…either the art style is too juvenile or just too simple, or the animation is terrible. Madoka Magica is BEAUTIFUL.

My strong recommendation is that all of you go watch it, there are only 12 20-minute episodes and a short movie. Independent of that, let me explain a little about what is going on on my nails. Each nail represents one of the magical girls in the TV show. I initially got really excited because as each girl accepts a contract to become a magical girl, they get markings on their nails to denote the shape and color of their magic.

Each marker has a link to an image of the nails on the character, if you are interested! My pinky is Sayaka, whose marker is a blue “C” and who has a magical talent with swords and a yearning for music (hence music notes). My ring finger is Mami, whose marker is some type of golden-orange cross-thing, and who has a magical talent with muskets and a yearning for family (her symbol tends to be flowers). My middle finger is the titular character Madoka, whose marker is a pink teardrop, and who has a magical talent that varies somewhat (bow and arrow, and spoilers) and yearns to protect others (and really likes butterflies). My pointer is Homura (who is my favorite character), whose marker is a purple diamond, and whose talent lies in controlling time (hence gears and clocks). Homura’s one desire is to protect Madoka. My thumb was inspired by Kyoko, whose symbol is a red oval, has an affinity for spears and magical fences, and yearns for food (i did a fence background rather than food). Not pictured is probably the cutest/creepiest character, Kyubey.

I used two colors (plus white) per nail, and 1-2 stamps for the background images (music notes, flowers, butterflies, gears and clocks, fences), so I am not going to list them all here! If you are curious about a particular color, I am happy to share it…but I doubt anyone actually cares 🙂

So now, please stare at the beautiful art that I found of these 5 characters (I don’t know who made the art and it is not from the TV show) but if you find yourself enticed, go watch! It is a really good expenditure of time. 😀

For Day 22 of the 31 Day Challenge, the theme was “song”. I’ve always had trouble with this one, since I can never decide if I want to do music in general, or the theme of a song, or something about the music video.

This year, I decided to be inspired by both the artist (P!nk) and the visuals of the song. I went with the song Just Give Me A Reason, which is depressing but I love the vocals! In the music video, P!nk sports her pale pink/white hair with a pink ribbon, and is wearing a pale pink lace dress. There are also a number of scenes featuring an off-white mattress. I just went with it!

My pinky, pointer, and thumb are all intended to be different bits of lace. My ring finger is a mattress (maybe, if you squint) although I should probably have used the quilting method. My middle finger is intended to be her hair, with the ribbon. I went a bit dark with the pink shade in the hair, but I still like it!

This mani is brought to you by clear stampers (seriously, I double stamped/shadow stamped all the nails except my middle finger which is TRIPLE stamped)! And too many stamping plates. The lace is from plates BP-L008, BP-L020, and EdM01. The hair and ribbon are from BM-S108 and BM-317. The mattress is from BM-209. Yikes! Hope you enjoyed, and go listen to the song!

I know it is getting just a bit cold to go swimming, but I painted these back in August so it was appropriate then! Besides, there are totally indoor pools, right?

The design was inspired by pricelessnails. Unfortunately, I did not quite figure out the spacing for my inner tube (the pink thing) so it is a bit…squished…compared to hers.

This is another new polish for me! What you see here is two thin coats of Glee Ridden by Emily de Molly. I have so many manis that I want to do that need a neon teal, and this looked perfect! It is, as expected, a very nice opaque neon teal creme. The color is slightly greener than turquoise, but very very bright! I am a fan.

I think I maybe should have done a bit more of a subtle gradient (that blue is darker than I expected, the polish used to be a semi-jelly and I think its congealed a bit), but this still came out well! I love how the waterspotting worked. I got a new white polish not too long ago so it actually spread on the water!

Really, I just wanted to play with some fun colors for “watermarble” day! I actually tried 4 combos before settling on this one…the right mix of bright, dark, and glitter.

I’ve been trying to marble with glitter polishes more frequently, since I rather love the effect they leave. This particular set of colors didn’t end up with the glitter mixed into the creme polishes as much as I would have hoped, but I still like it! For some reason, none of the purple or blues I used wanted to play along…and I wasn’t willing to risk my really expensive polishes just to see if they would marble.

I ended up using a bunch of polishes for this, and lets be honest, you probably cannot tell which is which in the photos! I named them all regardless :-p

Day 20….we are almost 2/3 through the 31 Day Challenge! And at this point I have completed all by the last day’s nail art. I like to pick from within the challenge for the honors nails you love prompt…I have a few ideas, but I am waiting around to see if someone does something that blows me away (and that I can imitate, cause lets be honest I would love to do ANYTHING Coewless has done for this challenge but I am simply not skilled enough). Hope you enjoyed!

Galaxy day is one of my favorites, because I love making and wearing galaxies! This one was a bit of an oddball though.

I went searching online for other examples of galaxy nail art based in red, since I was curious about light vs dark colors, and glitter amount. As it turns out, no one does red galaxy manis! I’ve found pink, purple, lots of blues and blacks, pastels…even an orange. But no red! So I decided to go ahead and fix this.

To create this, I ended up using 9 shades of red (glittery or otherwise) so I am not going to bother listing them. Suffice to say it was a lot and I have maybe too many red polishes.

I also rather love that redshift is actually a real term. It occurs when the wavelength of light increases, or gets “redder”. When referring to astrophysics, it describes a object getting further from our viewpoint…the cosmological redshift is a result of the expansion of the universe. If that isn’t cool, then I don’t know what is!

Of course, blueshift occurs when things get closer together, but a blue-based galaxy mani is just a normal galaxy mani so thats boring :-p. Hope you enjoyed! Both the nail art and the impromptu physics lesson 😀

Day 18 calls for “half moons” only, I really despite most half moon nail art. So, I decided to be sneaky and make half a moon in the sky! In retrospect, galaxy day is tomorrow so you guys get lots of astronomy :-p

The design was inspired by Chalkboard Nails, although I added some topography to the moon. I kinda wish I hadn’t, but whats done is done! I like how this came out.

Some day I will get acrylic nail paint and be able to make thin tiny lines (like the star novas). I do love that I do everything with nail polish, but it gets difficult!

Being honest, this was 100% inspired by Sassy Shelly, and I remain in awe of her. This was not a difficult mani to recreate, I just don’t have jelly polishes as bright as hers!

This is basically just a metallic silver mani with a stamp, and some color-in-the-lines. Well, paint in the lines. I had neither the right number of colors nor the right level of saturation, but I do like how it came out regardless! A bit more muted, and I had fun mixing colors at the end to get some blue-purple and pink-purple colors going to fill in more of the empty/silver spots.

The green and orange that I frankened worked quite well! Although they are both tiny TINY amounts and I need to make more if I’m going to be using them in any real capacity. Or buy real ones.

I am not going to bother listing the colors since most of them are either Zoya jellies (Paloma, Katherine, and Frida) or frankens. The silver is Excalibur by A England and the stamp is from Bundle Monster plate 605.

That’s all for today, hope you enjoyed! I need to stop playing with my jellies and use other things again, this is getting out of hand :-p

This mani somehow got lost! As soon as I saw the day 15 prompt of “delicate print” I knew which recent mani I wanted to use…but I had no mention of it in the posts that I put together to remind me of which polish I used! Such a fail.

I am just going to take a few guesses with this mani. I know that the base I used was my newest ILNP polish called Rosewater, a fantastic silvery-white polish, filled with holographic glitters, and swimming in pink shimmer. I really do not know how to describe this polish, other than to tell you to look at the photos. The polish goes from a soft white-silver to a glaring holographic rainbow. Throughout, it has a beautiful (and not subtle) bright pink shimmer that becomes peach and gold at certain angles. I absolutely adore this polish! There are a few others in this line (the “color kissed ultra holos”) and I kind of want them all.

I don’t actually remember how many coats of Rosewater I used here though! I think it was three thin coats, but it might have been two. I don’t matter. This polish is drop-dead amazing. It is one of those “if you could only take a few polishes with you to a deserted island what would you take” polishes. Guh.

Anyway, I didn’t want to cover up too much of this fantastic base, so I added a filigree design from one of my old Born Pretty plates. The fine lines almost disappear into the shimmer that is Rosewater, but I like it! I also ended up adding gold studs (although they went in different places on my two hands, the cuticle vs the free edge, and I don’t know which I like better)!

Traditionally, animal print day of the 31 Day Challenge has been one of my least favorites. I don’t enjoy leopard print, and I’ve done the traditional tiger stripes far too many times for it to be enjoyable. This time, I found a design that is still tiger-striped, but in a different way!

This mani was inspired by Polish and Paws because I never even thought to use this stamp! The other ones on the plate still don’t speak to me, but this was fun.

I also used this to compare my two dark orange glittery shimmer polishes…but totally forgot to take photos before the nail art was done! Oops. Anyway, on my pinky and pointer is two coats of OPI DS Indulgence, while on my ring, middle, and thumb is two coats of A England Gloriana. Indulgence is much brighter with more of a golden shimmer to it, while Gloriana is darker and has distinct golden flecks. The end result is that Gloriana looks more understated and elegant while Indulgence pops more!

Also I NEED polish thinner. 24 karat gold, which I used for the glitter gradient, is a dried up mess, useless for anything other than dab-on gradients! And even then it is painful to work with. Hope you enjoyed!

The problem with the prompt for Day 12, stripes, is that although I use a lot of striping tape, I seldom make stripes! I figured that criss-crosses were ok too :-p

This nail art was inspired by melyne nail art. Melyne used nail vinyl’s rather than striping tape, which both made her application easier and provided her with thicker stripes! Some day I need to invest in nail vinyls :-p although I do also like the way mine came out.

I think this is arguably the fourth day in the row with neon polishes. I don’t generally use neons that much, but I guess I was hit with the summer neon bug! To me this is funny because last summer and the year before every brand released a lot of neon polishes, which I did not see happen this year. So of course I’ve jumped on the bandwagon years late :-p

So, maybe this isn’t exactly what was meant by the prompt “polka dots” for day 11 of the 31 Day Challenge, but I find regular old polka dots boring so this is what you guys get instead!

Back in 2014 I did probably one of my favorite bits of nail art for polka dot day, inspired by Melyne. This year, I decided to do something very similar! Which is to say that this design, too, was inspired by Melyne…the designs are similar but both the inspiration from her and my own nails are slightly different!

That being said, I think I actually like the 2014 nails better. I spent more time on them and it shows! This year’s nails have a bit of a wonky line thing going on. But still lots of dots!

That’s it for today! I’ll have similar post sometime after the end of September where I show you what I wore on my other hand…I was far too lazy to freehand the whole thing so it is basically stamps with the same color scheme (spoilers). Hope you enjoyed!